Can Push VOD be the New Pull VOD?

Here’s a question I discussed at dinner in IBC last week.  If you could start a new TV business today how would you do it.  If your choice was to either  start a VOD based business or to launch a PVR based business, which would you choose?  When we discussed this in Amsterdam, the question was laced with a key assumption. This was that memory innovation will occur quicker than network innovation – i.e. hard drives will get bigger at a quicker rate than networks will increase in size and coverage. Meaning that push VOD, which  uses a PVR’s recording capability to create an on-demand outcome, could benefit from technology innovation faster that pull VOD will.  It it not unreasonable to imagine a generation of PVRs coming with 2-3 TB of memory and 5-10 tuners.

In their Anytime+ service we can already see how BSkyB use push-VOD to mitigate network deficiencies to deliver HD content on-demand.   The mechanism is invisible to consumers who are presented with screens offering the available shows.  We make the assumption that this is done with the agreement of the broadcasters concerned.  However, this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case.  As PVR memory sizes increase, and metadata becomes further integrated into TV systems, it may even  be possible for the platforms to configure a form of push-VOD which remove the need for any kind of on-demand agreements with the free-to-air broadcasters. They can do this by offering two things: a huge variety of new recording options and new, graphically rich, presentation techniques for the recorded shows.

Recording Options

The key here will be offering the consumer new functionality by which they can ‘self—create’ an on-demand outcome.    A PVR from one of the major pay platforms already includes innovations such as ‘green button’ prompts to record a show, and ‘series links’ to record whole series.  Further recording innovations could include:

• ‘Record all key shows’ from the major channels. The platform could then make an editorial decision about which shows it includes.
• Record ‘More Like This’ to allow genre based batch recordings
• Record by artist or director … or
• Group Record – where a channel is running a theme through its schedule.

Many of these features are already appearing on next generation PVRs like Virgin Tivo.

Presentation Techniques
Until the arrival of Virgin Tivo, PVRs presented their output as dry lists of programme titles.  The on-screen presentation of these lists could be very dull compared to interfaces like TV iPlayer.   If we also assume that thes hypothetical new PVRs would be broadband connected and contain web-like rich media interfaces, it would  be a reasonably simple matter to include new options to:

• Present recordings by ‘channel’ – so that each channel’s recorded output could be presented on a branded page, in date order, by A-Z or by genre
• Include rich graphics and browse functions within recorded areas making them look more like VOD players
• Include rich metadata on recorded shows (in fact this is already available on the Virgin Tivo box)
• Include social media recommendations areas.

All of these innovations are within reach of the next iteration of STB manufacturers and pay platform systems, who are currently struggling to put together deals to include the FTA broadcasters on-demand output in their services.  By creating self-served push-VOD areas for all the major channels would not have to match the depth or functionality of the FTA online players to succeed. They would have to be just good enough to stop consumers wanting to visit them.

If presented correctly by the platforms, the activity described above would have to be treated as recording activity by the consumer. While a broadcast channel could prevent use of its logos on the channel pages, the only way that it could prevent this broader ‘recording’ activity would be to remove its channel from the platform completely. It would no longer be possible to be half-in and half-out of a pay platform’s system.

Not having to do VOD deals to offer on-demand outcomes must be an attractive proposition for anyone looking for a more simple life in today’s complex TV industry.

Filed under: PVR / DTR / DVR

Are VOD deals worth the effort?

Nigel Walley – June 2011

We”ve been having a look at Virgin Tivo and having a think about what it means about the future of the TV landscape. Its begun to dawn on us that the implications could be quite significant.  Particularly as the pay platforms and the free-to-air broadcasters are finding it so hard to come to some sensible agreement about incorporating their catch-up services into the next generation pay TV services.   What Tivo and SkyAnytime+ show is that it might be easier if the platforms just ignored the broadcasters and used their PVRs to build their own versions of iPlayer and the other catch-up services.

How would this work?  We have previously looked at how BSkyB are using push-VOD to create an on-demand outcome in their Anytime+ service.  As PVR memory sizes increase, it will be possible for the pay platforms to use a form of push-VOD to remove the need for on-demand agreements with the free-to-air broadcasters.  The key will be offering the consumer new functionality by which they self—create an on-demand outcome.

A PVR from one of the major pay platforms already includes innovations such as ‘green button prompts to record’ and ‘series link’.  These are innovations that make use of the PVR easier for the consumer, but they don’t take away the key element which is that the outcome is still a consumer-requested record not ‘on-demand’.   The new PVRs also cluster the recorded shows together in folders, and let consumers arrange them in a variety of ways (eg A-Z, date order, or by whether a consumer has watched them already).  Tivo now uses the hard drive to offer Suggestions and Recommendations based on previous viewing behaviour (although these slightly break our new rule about these activities being clearly ‘consumer-requested’).

So hard drives are increasing in size (this week Western Digital today announced a 3TB hard drive for £100).   For now PVR memories  on the market have reached 1 Terrabyte, it is easier for the platforms to play with the extra recording space created.     It has dawned on us how easy it would be for the platforms to add new types of recording and presentation capability to create outcomes that mimic iPlayer, ITV Player and the others.

It would be a reasonably simple matter for the platforms  to include new options on a PVR to allow a consumer to opt to:

• Record ALL key shows from all major channels (letting me choose which channels to apply the functionality to). The platform could then make an editorial decision about which shows it includes.
• Present recordings by ‘channel’ – so that each channel’s recorded output could be presented on a branded page, in date order, by A-Z or by genre (as with the iPlayer menus).
• Include new presentation  functions (such as the browse film strip in iPlayer) within the channel areas to increase  the general utility of the recorded shows
• Include rich metadata on recorded shows (as is already available on the Virgin Tivo box).

All of the above innovations are possible with the current iterations of the pay platforms software.  The weak point is the number of available tuners.  Current chip sets would be swamped but Broadcom, and other manufacturers, have already announced chips with 5 or 6 tuners.  That is a lot of recording capability.  What’s even more interesting is that some of these features have been included in the revised Freesat / Freeview specifications within the D-Book and are creeping out into Freeview boxes.

But who would actually do this?  For the major pay platforms, the box strategy does not allow for continual upgrades.  It is hard to create a unified service strategy if all of your consumers are using different specifications of boxes.  The free platforms are unlikely to be allowed to do this, given their shareholder profile.  It is left to the smaller pay platforms  – Fetch, 3View etc- who may be able to use this capability to create a market difference.

The cumulative outcome of introducing them would be for the platform to have created self served push-VOD areas for all the major channels.  The key element being that  the customer should notionally opt-in to these functions.

These channel pages do not have to match the depth or functionality of the FTA online players to succeed. They have to be just good enough to stop consumers wanting to visit them.  While a broadcast channel could prevent use of its logos on the channel pages, the only way that a broadcaster would have to prevent this broader ‘recording’ activity would be to remove their broadcast channel from the platform completely.

Under this regime, it would no longer be possible to be half-in and half-out of a pay platform’s system.

Authors Addition:  Since writing this, Steve Jobs announced his iCloud initiative. This is where the world starts to get very interesting.  Could cloud computing arrive on TV?  Is cloud computing just what the TV industry would call a ‘network PVR’?   If I have a network PVR, could my hard-drive be ten times the size of my Sky 1TB box and have the recording functions mentioned above applied to all channels?  Are Sky and Virgin now going to have to compete with Apple to manage my online media?

Filed under: Distribution & Devices, PVR / DTR / DVR, iPlayer, ITV Player

Why do I still watch broadcast TV?

Adrian Stroud – June 2009

I recently challenged myself to work-out why I still watch so much ‘live’ TV. I don’t mean news or sport because I can rationalise those genres quite easily. I mean bread and butter programming.
The challenge came about because I was debating just how much more damage all the VOD services and PVRs will do to live TV viewing figures in the long-run. This is important because it is those live viewing figures that contribute the vast bulk of advertising impacts. VOD currently delivers far, fewer impacts per hour of viewing than live TV, so the ‘end game’ for advertising funded TV programming is defined by this question. My guess was that live TV won’t drop more than perhaps 25%, no matter how many VOD and time shifting gadgets like Sky+ launch, but I could not say why. I suspect I’m making the mistake of confusing the technology with the benefits.
VOD and the PVR are the rational way to consume all but the livest of live TV events. So, when VOD has all the content you want and it is available on every screen in the house, why would you want to watch ordinary old broadcast TV at all?
Live TV has one strong thing going for it – ‘missability’. When you turn your TV on, the rational thing to do is to check a few favourite channels to see if something is sneaking past you that you might like. If I find something valuable in this initial foray into live TV I’ll add it to my Sky+ planner. But here is an odd thing, having committed to recording a newly discovered programme and all subsequent episodes; I’ll probably continue browsing likely sources of live entertainment. When I’m in this mode I’m not actually looking to make a commitment to something I really enjoy. I’m probably expecting to be interrupted or be forced to change channel to meet someone else’s taste. The stuff I really like is salted away for some future, quiet, uninterrupted hour that never comes. So missability is a factor for me at the moment but what if just about every TV programme you could think of was available on demand? How can you miss something then?
Misability is not always what drives me to the broadcast channels first. The conditions under which it seems appropriate to commit to a piece of VOD material are quite specific. The kids must be in bed (a deadline that slips further and further into the evening) and a joint decision must be made with Mrs Stroud as to the duration available for shared viewing and of course there is then a debate about exactly what to watch.
By habitually recording things I like and then delaying their consumption to some future ideal moment that never arrives, I could easily end-up watching less programming that I really enjoy than I did when I had to strike while the iron was hot.
Here is another odd thing. Watching one of my ‘favourite’ programmes sometimes just does not appeal as much as watching short bursts of fairly random content. When left alone with the remote control and hour to waste, I’m likely to channel hop. I might leave a programme in a dull bit and give it another chance a few minutes later knowing that it will have moved-on.
The use of Sky+ to time-shift seems to have levelled off at about 15%. This is an average drawn from a very wide spectrum of behaviour so don’t worry if you are not typical. It is not an average like the average shoe size for men is 10, it is more like the average score for a blindfolded darts player will be 10.
Maybe 15% has always been the average amount of consciously planned TV viewing, and VOD and PVRs have simply revealed this underlying truth? Maybe 85% of viewing was always low-commitment and ‘a bit random’ and we were unconsciously quite happy with this. Let’s face it, how could TV have become such a world-wide hit, occupying many hours a day for most people in most countries if ‘fairly random, low commitment viewing’ was not fun?
So the reason I watch live TV is rational but it is not about being live, it is about serendipity and the way it can be randomly sampled – it is a about browsability. When I channel-hop into a programme half way through, I know that is what I have done and that is exactly what I wanted to do. I don’t want to navigate a hierarchical menu system, highlight a title, see the channel indents, pre roll and then sample ten minutes of scene-setting before a drama gets going. I want a random few seconds somewhere in the middle. I don’t even want a ‘sampler’ of best bits edited together. If I go back to the same programme five minutes later I want it to have moved-on by five minutes. If I’m channel hopping while the children are still around I want to know that I’m not going to stumble across something violent, rude or frightening. Of course, when they are safely in bed these become positive selection criteria.
I have yet to see a VOD system that has the browsability of live TV and that encourages the same happy-go-lucky lack of commitment to viewing a whole programme. But surely a VOD system could mimic these attractive features of broadcast TV and offer added benefits? I suspect that the current generation of VOD systems are assuming that our TV consumption is more planned and sensible than it really is.
Rather than thinking about what the end-game is for live broadcast versus on demand, the real question might be how much TV viewing will remain low-commitment, fairly random sampling? It would be surprising if on-demand systems did not eventually meet the need for browsability better than the current broadcast channels. But if they do, will they be able to deliver about fifteen, spots an hour like live TV does? If you have some cash for research I’d love to see what can be done.

Filed under: Ad Formats & Cases, Commercial Models, Distribution & Devices, Future Advertising, Interfaces & Functionality, IPTV, PVR / DTR / DVR, 4OD, BBC, BT Vision, CH4, CH5, ch5 on demand, demand five, iPlayer, IPTV, ITV, ITVplayer, Joost, Sky, Sky Anytime, SkyPlayer, Tiscali, topupTV, VOD

Acronym A Go-Go

Nigel Walley - March 2009

I received an email this week from a contact who works in the TV industry in Australia asking my opinion on something to do with what he called ‘PDRs’?   Now I had to stop and think what on earth he was talking about. Eventually I went back to him to check my assumption that PDR meant ‘personal digital recorders’.   These are, of course, what we would call a personal video recorder (PVR) or, if you believe Sky, a digital video recorder (DVR) or, if you follow Tess Alp’s of Thinkbox’s mantra, a ‘digital television recorder’ (DTR) or, if you are the Dixon’s web site, a little bit of all of them, without explaining the difference.

Now when this acronym fiasco started we were only really dealing with two options – PVR and DVR.  Decipher made the assumption that a personal video recorder – a PVR – was something that behaved like Tivo in the US, learning about your likes and dislikes and recommending programmes to make a truly ‘personal’ service.  A digital video recorder – a DVR - was a more simple device which just did exactly what you told it to do.   I know  that Thinkbox were concerned that neither of these acronyms contained the word television.  As the main cheerleaders for the UK broadcast ad sales market, Thinkbox’s Tess Alps wanted to make sure that telly was central to the idea, and began to promote DTR.  In fact she has been banging heads around the industry to make us all use the same DTR acronym.  Strangely, among some consumers, the name of the original box in the market, Sky+, is becoming a bit of a generic term for the device. It is not uncommon to hear people say ‘I Sky Plussed it’ when they have recorded something. We have even heard people with a Freeview PVR say the same thing.  On Decipher’s behalf I can say that we really don’t care which acronym is used, as long as all providers in the industry coalesce around it.

The confusion about what to call this device is typical of the TV industry shooting itself in the foot over new technology introductions.  Compared to the internet, the TV industry always struggles to get quick, mass acceptance of new technology introductions, particularly within the creative communities.  Their inability to agree to industry wide naming conventions goes a long way to explain this.   A great example is the advent of catch-up TV on-demand.  Half the platforms called it catch-up TV, while BT Vision and Tiscali / Homechoice decided to call it ReplayTV.  Nonsensical.  Thankfully, Tiscali has now changed sides, and called it catch-up. However, BT Vision currently is still sticking to the Replay idea. 

This just highlights how the TV industry has a crying need for shared terms, descriptions, icons and signage around its new functionality. However getting the different platforms (Sky, Virgin, BT Vision, Freeview and FreeSat) to agree about something, is liking herding really belligerant cats. What tends to happen is that the platform that gets to market with a new feature first, gets to establish names and presentational conventions. Hopefully, the rest then adopt these, however the catch-up example shows that this isn’t always the case.

The area crying out for co-ordination at the moment is future advertising formats. As on-demand and PVR capability roll out onto every platform, the potential for new ad formats to be delivered is multiplying. Red buttons, green buttons and yellow buttons are being called into play by different platforms, each of who are emphasising a different set of formats in their development plans.  For agencies and brand clients trying to work through this, it will be a nightmare, unless some group can broker a more co-ordinated approach.  As we saw with early red button campaigns, unless agencies are given standard formats and terminology across all platforms, they just don’t come on board and its impossible to drive volume.  This might be the time for a bit more of Tess’ head banging.

Filed under: Distribution & Devices, PVR / DTR / DVR, DTR, DVR, Future Advertising, Future Programming, PVR, Sky, Virgin